Page

Page is the Tower's base unit of recorded surface, defined under Concordance 9 as "that leaf which, being inscribed, may be cited, and being cited, may not be discarded without warrant" (Annex 2, clause i). The definition is circular, has been challenged four times, and has never been improved upon. Pages are counted in quires of twenty-four at every floor; the practice of counting them at all is administered by the Clerks of the Fixed Page, who maintain the quire-registers and are, by long custom, the only body permitted to say aloud how many pages a given floor contains.

That figure is not stable. It is the ordinary experience of the archive that a floor surveyed in spring holds a different number of pages by autumn without any accession being recorded. The Clerks attribute this to recension, the silent replacement of leaves by corrected leaves; the School of the Unmarked Page attributes it to the Clerks. Neither view has been tested, since the registers themselves are pages.

Kinds of page

The archive recognises several classes, though the taxonomy is not exhaustive and the Clerks resist making it so.

• Fixed pages — inscribed, counted, and registered; the ordinary holding.
• Unwritten pages — surfaces reserved for subjects not yet documented; see below.
• Mute pages — pages whose content may be read but not cited. Custody of these belongs to the Lector of the Mute Page.
• Silent pages — pages recorded as present but blank to every instrument.
• Clean pages — stock watermarked for the purposes of the Clean Page Doctrine.

The classes overlap more than the list suggests. A page may be mute and fixed; a page may be clean and, by a ruling of Concordance 33, nonetheless unwritten. The overlap is where most of the disputation lives.

Quire-ninth and the affair of the missing leaf

In the winter of the year the Clerks call Quire-ninth, a survey of the fourth gallery of the Scriptorium of the Interleaved Page returned a count of one thousand and eight pages against a register of one thousand and nine. The missing leaf was never found. The Clerks recorded the discrepancy as a lapse of the ninth kind and closed the matter, whereupon the Adherents of the Persistent Page objected that a closed matter is not a counted one, and appended a dissenting memorandum of forty pages to the survey — thereby restoring the total to one thousand and nine and, incidentally, exceeding it.

"A count that repairs itself by objection is not a count but a conversation, and the Clerks are not paid to converse."

— Clerks of the Fixed Page, Register of Quire-ninth, marginal note 4

The memorandum was later reclassified as a mute page and cannot now be cited, which is why the figure of one thousand and nine is the only one on public record.

Treatment of unwritten pages

Documentation for subjects that do not exist must be set down on an Unwritten Page, as provided by Concordance 17 and, more sharply, by Concordance 41, ratified in the Year of the Silent Page. The watermark of such a page is not visible under ordinary lamplight; it emerges only under the diagnostic spectrum emitted by the Aerostatic Page-Turning System, a fact established by the Third Survey of Illuminated Stock and disputed by no one except the Survey's own second reviser.

Form OVC-22a, on which unwritten pages are declared, is printed on Clean Page stock and is therefore watermarked twice — once for the form, once for the declaration. The duplication has caused no recorded error and is defended fiercely.

Disputation on counting

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether a page may be said to exist before it is inscribed. Concordance 9 holds that it may not; a leaf uninscribed is stock, not page. Concordance 41, Annex 6, holds the reverse, reasoning that a page which cannot be inscribed is still owed a warrant under the Clean Page Doctrine, and that a thing owed a warrant must first exist in order to be owed anything.

"Two Concordances, one page, and no agreement as to whether it is there. We have kept the disagreement in a drawer since the Disputation on the Phantom Page and have found no reason to take it out."

— Librarian Ordway Vess, Notes on the Ninth Concordance, 4th recension

The Sect of the Thirsty Page proposes a third position — that a page exists in the degree to which it is wanted — which the Clerks have declined to enter in the registers on the grounds that desire is not a measure.

Handling and prohibitions

Pages below the Clean Page are conveyed by the Kinetic Page-Turner or, where a procedure under the Clean Page Doctrine does not apply, with Null-Gloves. Bare hands are permitted on Fixed Pages only, and only in the presence of a Page-Sentinel. Under Concordance 52, clause vii, no page may be turned by breath, and the prohibition is enforced at the Murmuration of the Fallen Page, where it is the standing cause of most recorded incidents.

The Penumbral Annexes, administered under the simplified rules, permit counting by eye but not by finger.